Ten years ago I dropped a huge (for me) sum of cash for a digital projector. Five years later I dropped half as much cash for an upgrade that featured twice the resolution and lumens with a contrast ratio that was at least four times better. And now, well, now anyone can buy a digital projector for a third what I paid on that last model and which, in general, will kick the pants off of what I currently have attached to my ceiling. Despite such technological achievements in projection, every summer I drag out a piece of analog technology that is over 100-years old and show 16mm films in my backyard.

Sound? Pure mono that comes out the projector perched atop a dresser in my guest-room travelling via a ¼ inch jack attached to a 50-ft speaker wire that is trundled through the cat door to get outdoors and to find its way into one lonely speaker placed near a scavenged cinema screen erected by my neighbors fence. Image? Obviously this varies from print to print, but you can expect some wear-and-tear, color fade, scratches, and other signs of degradation. The most egregious compromise to the ideal of how the film was originally presented? Well, that would be in the fact that I insert ten-minute “intermissions” into every reel break since I only have one projector. Here’s the kicker: all these compromises add up to a sum of parts that asserts its own glorious triumph over the high-tech systems of even the most elaborate, large-screen, home-entertainment system.

Why? Leaving aside the normal aesthetic arguments for the warmth of an image that comes from projected light and thus connects in our brain on some primal level that goes back to campfires and shadow-puppets (versus, say, a steady but sterile stream of zeros and ones being processed bya computer chip), I’d say that there’s something about this 16mm setup that is magical the way a train set is magical. I love to see the faces of kids (and adults) light up when they see the projector in action for the first time. This dog-sized contraption of metal gears, bulbs, and fuses whirls away at 24-frames a second, unspooling from one reel to another as it sprocket-feeds the film-strip through a lit gate. And when the reel is done and I take a few minutes to rewind the film and get ready to feed the next one in, these intermissions allow for bathroom and snack breaks, encourage conversation amidst friends and neighbors, and somehow add to the festive nature of the whole thing.

As a person who makes his living as a film programmer, and somebody who has been showing 16mm films in my backyard for almost ten years, I’ve been surprisingly bone-headed in picking titles that I are, shall we say, “neighbor friendly.” Last summer, for example, I was so excited to show a good-condition and letter-boxed print of Eraserhead that I sent out invitations to the neighborhood without even once thinking that, just maybe, the church-going families around me might not appreciate the finer points of David Lynch’s disturbing, mutant-baby, sperm-stomping phantasmagoria. In my defense, and putting aside the issue of what is appropriate for general audiences, watching Eraserhead outdoors and under the stars did fuse into a transcendental moment, especially at the end. For me, at least… but that’s being a bit selfish.

Having learned my lesson, this summer I inaugurated the backyard series with screenings of select titles from my private collection of prints that I salvaged from a dumpster that I knew would be a hit with friends, neighbors, and kids. They were: A Cat in the Hat (animation), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Harryhausen’s classic, in “Dynarama”), and a three-minute bit of clay animation called Jimmy the C that featured a caricature of Jimmy Carter with Ray Charles singing “Georgia on my Mind.” A highlight, to name but one, came in seeing my friend’s four-and-half-year-old daughter get genuinely scared at the first sight of Harryhausen’s Cyclops. She was no stranger to Harryhausen’s monsters, having recently seen Jason and the Argonauts in the comfort of her own home, and on a nice, big-screen digital projection system. But for this screening she clambered onto her father’s lap and said “Daddy, it’s a lot scarier on this screen.”